Walk the Line: The Citizen treks across the biggest infrastructure project in Ottawa’s history

It’s just before 9 a.m. and I am sitting on a grassy knoll, watching a huge crane pick up and move long pieces of reinforced steel. The racket of drills and hammers fills the air. Bone by bone, the skeleton of Blair station is coming to life. But I seem to be the only one paying much attention to what’s happening on the other side of the fence on this overcast Thursday morning.

In the distance, cars and trucks are backed up on the 174. The station teases drivers who might someday soon choose to glide into the city by train, instead of dealing with the daily bunch-up at the Split.

I’m often surprised by how little people know about the LRT. They may know of it, but they’re often foggy on the details. It seems to go unmentioned in conversation unless you live or work near it or your business has suffered because of it.

Yet the Confederation line is rising up around us, the largest infrastructure project the city has ever conceived. Every bit of track laid brings us one step closer to its birth.

Blair Station is rising.JULIE OLIVER /
Postmedia

I’ve come here — to what will be either the beginning or end of the line, depending on your perspective — to get acquainted.

I want to see more than tiny pictures on a website or pretty renderings on display boards. I want more than photo ops with smiling politicians in hard hats.

I want to trace its path across the city, from east to west. I want to imagine what a person riding the train in a few short years might see out the window. I want to see the neighbourhoods and nooks the train will touch. I want to connect the dots in this story of our city’s coming of age.

I want to walk the line.

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I’m not exactly sure what to expect. I’ve packed a notebook, a banana, a bag of nuts and a one-litre Nalgene water bottle. The line from Blair station to its western terminus at Tunney’s Pasture is 12.5 kilometres long. My route won’t be as direct, so I expect I’ll walk closer to 15 km. My goal is to never lose sight of the line, except when I’m downtown, when I’ll just have to trust there is a tunnel below me, somewhere.

The entrance to the Gloucester Centre — about 75 steps from future Blair station — catches my eye first.

The mall will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2018, the same year the Confederation line is expected to open.

Former Gloucester mayor Harry Allen had hoped it would help make the city “an exciting people place,” but the mall itself drew the top spot on Citizen architecture critic Rhys Phillips’ round up of buildings we could have done without that year.

“The combination of peach marble, red neon and ‘heritage’ lamps is a gauche parody of life trapped in a mall,” he wrote back in January of 1989.

âA gauche parody of life trapped in a mall.âErrol McGihon /
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Plans to expand, including a five-storey tower above the main foyer, never materialized.

Today, there’s a Loblaws at one end, a Walmart at the other, and a hodge-podge of small shops and food counters in between. Light spills in from cathedral skylights that run the length of the tidy, quiet central concourse.

While some are optimistic the LRT will bring more people to the mall and with them, hopefully, more stores and jobs, the shops and restaurants already here must first survive two more years of disruption.

The new location of the Blair bus loop, to the east of the old station’s entrance, has reduced the number of people who pass through the mall on a daily basis, says Mark Maynard, who manages the Mongolian Village Grill.

Maynard’s sales are down and he rhymes off a number of other restaurants facing the same problem. “It’s great LRT is going to be there in 2018, but you have to last until then.”

From the Gloucester Centre, I slip behind a largely vacant retail plaza, across a grassy field to the parking lot of a short office tower, and into a small forest near City Centre Park.

The highway noise fades out as I stroll along a dirt path. The LRT tracks are on my left, behind a tall fence.

The trail meanders back into the forest and I soon arrive at a small reservoir. The ground is littered with charred pieces of wood and crushed Pabst Blue Ribbon cans — signs of parties past.

I thought the trail might be popular with dog walkers, but I’m all alone.

I make my way back to the tracks and spot three workers. They’re bent over and I can’t make out what exactly they’re doing (though, I confess, even if they were standing up, I might not know what they’re doing). They don’t pay me any attention and I wander back into the bush, only to emerge a few minutes later at the edge of the Aviation Parkway.

When there’s a break in traffic, I dart across four lanes of road and into a thick bush, which slopes down to where the tracks continue.

Branches and scrubby brush lash my arms and legs. I try to pick my way along the fence but the undergrowth is too thick, so I descend deeper into this bush, a woodlot owned by the National Capital Commission.

As it scratched and scrapes at me, I push ahead, ignoring the sudden rush of doubt: “Perhaps this wasn’t such a great idea.”

The bush is quiet, save for the sound of breaking twigs and grunting.

I look up, and my heart sinks.

“That’s a f—ing fence.”

Saying it out loud makes it somehow feel more real.

There’s no way I can climb it, so I veer to the right and continue bushwhacking. After several more minutes of struggle, I come upon a shorter black fence and hop over.

I’m free, but covered in burs.

Before me, across a manicured lawn, stands a trio of handsome condominium buildings known as Place des Gouverneurs.

The brown-brick buildings topped with mansard roofs are designed to echo stately European apartment houses of the early 20th century. They stand out like diamonds in the industrial roughness of Cyrville Road.

Back in October 2005, when the first residents moved in, Richcraft Homes was lauded for creating exactly the kind of thing Ottawa needed inside the Greenbelt. The company even won a prize that year for the best high-density high-rise project.

“This is the best example of smart growth in the city,” the ward’s former city councillor once boasted.

The company has added four additional condo buildings to the development and is constructing four matching apartment buildings, making these some of the closest homes to the LRT line east of downtown.

The dream of many is to see this rail line direct future development, creating new neighbourhoods and intensifying older ones. It won’t all happen overnight, but being close to transit seems at least partly responsible for some of the new developments popping up elsewhere along the route.

And there could be some surprises, as people see and take advantage of opportunities that aren’t yet apparent. “That’s what’s really wonderful about growth,” says architect Ritchard Brisbin. “It can provide you with very pleasant surprises, not just the traditional expansion.”

Richcraft sales representative Anna D’Aoust says being so close to transit is a big draw for buyers and renters alike. “They’re excited the LRT is going to be here.”

In the meantime, however, people here have been left a bit high and dry when it comes to transit. Cyrville is the only Transitway station the city completely shut down for the duration of LRT construction.

“That was the only kicker,” says Martin Robichaud, who bought a place here four years ago.

On the Transitway, a bus to downtown took less than 15 minutes. Now his options are spending the same amount of time walking to St. Laurent station or waiting for a bus that doesn’t come all that often.

So he did the one thing transit planners absolutely don’t want people to do: He bought a car. And it’s unclear whether he’ll give it up in two years time, when the station reopens for trains. It costs less for him and his partner to drive downtown together and pay for parking than it would to buy two adult monthly passes, he says.

If there is a silver lining to the closure of Cyrville station, it’s that it offers people one of the best chances to envision what the new station will look like.

I walk along the sidewalk on the north side of the road. It’s level with the station’s upper platform. This is where riders will enter. I see a hole in the concrete where the elevator shaft will eventually be. I see a staircase down to track level. I see the station’s roof tipping up toward the sky.

As Brisbin explains, the approach his Ottawa firm took to station design was simple: They wanted riders to intuitively understand where they needed to go.

“We wanted the stations to explain themselves,” he says.

Ritchard Brisbin says the LRT stations need to be intuitive for commuters.Darren Brown

Each will contain a combination of the same essential elements — roofs, elevators, escalators and stairs — but because each station has different requirements, the pieces are configured differently.

One commonality is that the roof forms are folded in a manner that allows a visitor to understand where the entrance is.

“They tend to rise up and open where the entrance is, they tend to bend and twist and move towards the direction you’re going to need to go once you arrive,” he explains.

Station names will appear on lanterns that will glow after dark, and also contain transit maps, ticket machines and emergency phones.

When the same elements are in the same place at different stations, the system becomes familiar to people. The stations, Brisbin says, become “part of your friendly neighbourhood.”

“As soon as people start to understand how they move through a building, they relax.”

I cross Cyrville and walk along an asphalt path between the tracks and various buildings. I stay close to the fence and eventually find a ramp that takes me into the parking lot of St. Laurent shopping mall.

This is the first time I lose sight of the line as it dips under St. Laurent Boulevard and into a tunnel.

At the station, everything is behind construction hoarding. It’s impossible to catch a glimpse of what is happening here.

What a shame. Wouldn’t people get more excited about the LRT, perhaps even more persuaded to accept the “short-term pain for long-term train” Mayor Jim Watson repeatedly refers to, if they could see the project rising up, even in fleeting glimpses?

I continue on past the mall, across a parking lot and behind an office tower. There’s a fence around the next property so I end up on Coventry Road.

I’ve become separated from the line.

Heading west, it leaves St. Laurent, tunnels diagonally under the Queensway and re-emerges on the south side, where it runs along Tremblay Road. I head south on Belfast, cross the highway and eventually catch up to it.

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Track for the new LRT line being laid near Belfast Road at Tremblay.JULIE OLIVER /
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Belfast Yard and Tremblay

A spur of rail line veers off to the south in the direction of Trainyards and a massive maintenance and storage facility across the road. This is where light-rail vehicles are assembled and where they will return each night once the line opens.

I was given a peek inside the hangar-like space last fall as workers assembled the undercarriage of a train. The 12-metre-long white frame sat on a heavy-duty rotisserie that let workers turn it easily so they never had to work over their heads. All they do is finish one side, flip it over and work on the other side.

The first Alstom Citadis train fully assembled in Ottawa rolled off the line earlier this year. The mayor tweeted pictures.

Behind Belfast Yard, a newly built berm rises as high as a house, creating a grassy ridge between the assembly plant and the railway tracks used by Via. It’s the first time the two lines — the Via tracks and the LRT — cross each other, with the light rail line travelling underneath the Via line).

The berm was built by Thunderbolt Contracting, a Carp-based company owned by Andy McNeely.

He started it 25 years ago, when he was 20, cutting grass and clearing snow. He branched out into landscaping after five years and soon employed 30 people.

He decided to grow the company about four years ago in hopes of landing a bigger piece of the local pie.

Thunderbolt now employs about 70 full-time people in the summer, including eight or 10 working on LRT-related jobs.

Besides the berm, which is filled with material dug out of the 2.5-kilometre tunnel that runs underneath downtown, the company planted a stand of new trees in front of Belfast Yard.

Thunderbolt has also been hired to do landscaping at Blair, Cyrville and Hurdman stations, as well as plant a special seed mix to create a natural cover along parts of the rail line. This is a tricky job because there are so many different people doing different jobs already in a relatively tight space, McNeely explains.

And everyone’s under the gun. The track work has to be done this fall so testing of trains along a four-kilometre stretch can begin soon after.

“It’s just go, go, go,” McNeely says.

Our man on the line looks out over the intersection of Belfast Road and Tremblay Road in Ottawa.James Park /
Postmedia

Thunderbolt is only one of the local companies cashing in on light rail. There are dozens more sharing the $900 million to be collected by Ottawa-area firms and subcontractors by the time the project is done.

Though the company’s work is less obvious, Broder Electric was hired as a subcontractor to do grounding, wiring and conduit work.

Fred Broder, whose grandfather founded the company in 1932, boils down grounding this way: When you plug something into an outlet, the purpose of the third prong is to provide a safe path for a transient voltage.

“That’s basically what we’re doing there, just on a bigger scale,” he says.

Broder is pleased so many local companies are working on the line, instead of some fly-by-nighters from out of town.

“When you see these major developments going on in Ottawa and they’re not being done by Ottawa contractors or Ottawa workers, it pisses you off,” he tells me. “So when you see a project like this come along and you get an opportunity to work on it, it’s good.”

Along the way, I’ve also noticed slabs of concrete stamped with the words “ANCHOR KINGSTON.” There’s a 1-800 number, so I dial it.

Anchor, I learn, is a family-owned company that specializes in custom-made concrete products. For the Confederation line, Anchor is supplying pre-cast trenches to be used for running electrical cables along the tracks.

Each U-shaped trough is 2.5 metres long, about a metre wide and comes with two cover slabs. Together, the three pieces weigh about 1.6 tonnes.

Anchor is supplying more than four kilometres worth of these cable trenches, which are made in Kingston with Ontario ingredients. The concrete is composed of sand from a pit in Seeley’s Bay and stone from a quarry located just north of the 401 near Kingston.

Having grown up in Ottawa, the company’s vice-president, Jude Tremblay, says he’s glad to be playing a part in the LRT build.

“It’s been a long time coming to have some sort of light-rail system in Ottawa,” he says. “It’s exciting to see.”

Back at the corner of Belfast and Tremblay, I spot a restaurant inside a one-and-a-half-storey white building. The Bell payphone booth out front is the first indication that the White Horse Restaurant is of another time.

It’s also an island, the only small business in any direction for some distance.

“Some call it a hidden gem,” says owner Tallal “Mike” Ayoub (Tallal is the name on his liquor licence, but a lot of folks know him as Mike, he says).

He’s been in Ottawa for 40 years and has owned the restaurant since 1999.

He came from Lebanon, where he was part of the mass exodus of people who left after a civil war broke out in 1975. He came to Canada and worked as a dishwasher in his brother’s restaurant on Bank Street. He worked his way up to cook, then cashier.

Ayoub and his wife, who works alongside him, have two children — a daughter and a son. Both are in their early 20s now.

The décor isn’t fancy — diner booths with vinyl-covered seating, a bar along one wall, a gum-ball machine that takes quarters. But the steady lunchtime traffic doesn’t seem to mind.

It’s a popular spot for people who work in the area, including on the LRT line, people who live in nearby Eastway Gardens and other regulars, some who come from as far away as Orléans.

They come for Ayoub’s fattoush salad and club sandwich; his hot chicken and hot beef; his poutine and meat sauce. For his breakfast special, priced at $4.95 before 11 a.m.

His fries are made from fresh potatoes, his soups from scratch. When I finished my chocolate milkshake, I want another.

Ayoub’s not sure just yet what the opening of the line will mean to his bottom line. It’s hard to imagine it could get any worse than the protracted closure of Belfast Road, which dragged on for month upon month.

There was heavy machinery, imposing fences and dust everywhere. People thought the restaurant was closed. “We squeaked through with hard work and patience,” he says.

Farther west on Tremblay Road, I slip into the Ottawa Train Station to use the washroom and refill my water bottle.

Via Rail train No. 45, with service to Fallowfield, Kingston and Toronto, is boarding.

I’ve always loved this building, and it seems I’m not alone. John Parkin’s mid-century modern Ottawa station was built in 1966 and won a Massey Medal for architecture the following year.

I ask Brisbin about the challenge of incorporating new stations into the urban fabric, alongside notable buildings such as this one.

You don’t try to compete, he says. And you don’t mimic, either.

The new Tremblay LRT station, which is being built a bit west of where the former Transitway station, may stand alone here, but it’s part of something larger, he explains.

“We looked at the stations as essentially a 12-kilometre-long civic building with a series of doorways into it.”

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View of gap between old Hurdman Bridge and new Guideway under construction that it will connect to eventually to carry the LRT.Julie Oliver /
Postmedia

Hurdman

I pass a long line of taxis and head for a multi-use path on the north side of the line, which takes me down to where Tremblay and Riverside Drive intersect. I’ve passed this place hundreds of time before getting on or off the Queensway, but I’ve never been here on foot. It’s not particularly hospitable.

I cross Riverside and pass under two bridges — one for the LRT and one for Via. That Toronto-bound train cruises by just as I reach the top of the small hill.

In my head, I picture the unique view that will be visible here in a short time, when LRT and Via trains run along beside each other for a short jaunt.

Before me, Hurdman station is a hive of activity as workers build the guideway, a huge, elevated concrete structure that trains will travel along through this area. It’s the part of the system that most closely resembles a monorail.

Despite the construction, Hurdman remains a key junction. A temporary bus loop has been built to the east of where the old station used to be to serve the constant stream of buses.

I follow a gravel path around the construction site, peering through the fence every couple of steps to take another look at the guideway.

What would Charles Hurdman think?

Hurdman is the patriarch of the family for whom this station, bridge and nearby park are all named for.

He and his brother, Henry, came to Hull Township from Ireland, by way of New York, in 1818. They were both farmers, according to Diane Aldred’s telling in The Aylmer Road: An Illustrated History.

Henry later moved to Eardley Township while Charles settled on the northeast corner of Aylmer and Deschênes roads. He died in 1847, but his widow, Margaret, five sons and one daughter continued to live at the corner for some time after.

By 1860, three of the sons, William, Charles and Robert, had begun lumbering under the name “W. Hurdman and Brothers.”

While Charles Jr. stayed on Aylmer Road, brothers William and Robert moved to Gloucester Township, where they built Hurdman’s Bridge over the Rideau River during the 1860s. They wanted easier access to their lumber piling grounds, located where the Ottawa Train Station is today, but they let the public use the bridge. Eventually, the county took it over.

A third brother, George, also settled in Gloucester; I’ll come back to him in a bit.

The Hurdman’s lumber company grew during the 1880s and their mill on Table Rock at the Chaudiére was one of the largest at the falls.

One account said the company was responsible for 43 million board feet of lumber in 1886, a share of the total 288 million board feet produced that year.

It all came to blazing end in 1900, when Hull’s great fire wiped out most of that city, as well as LeBreton Flats and the houses down Preston and Rochester streets all the way to Dow’s Lake.

The Great Fire of 1900 in Ottawa-Hull led to what would today equal at least $140 million in damage.City of Ottawa Archives CA-2823

Seven people died, 14,000 were left homeless and the damage added up to $6.5 million (the Bank of Canada’s inflation clock even doesn’t go back that far, but had that damage occurred in 1914, it would work out to nearly $140 million in 2016 dollars).

The Hurdman Brothers’ mill was destroyed and never rebuilt.

Afterward, according to the 1968 book Carleton Saga, which documents the county’s early trials and tribulations, the Hurdmans turned their attention to farming and horse breeding.

William, who had also served two terms as Reeve of Gloucester Township in the late 1870s, died in 1901 and was buried in Beechwood Cemetery.

As for George, the well-regarded farmer and milkman fathered many children, including a son named Walter. And it was his sons, Walter Jr. and Fraser, who would later play a unique role in Ottawa’s public transit history.

A March 30, 1963 ad in the Citizen explains.

“We apologize for any inconvenience which this may cause the public.”

Let that sink in for a second. The Hurdmans had the contract to tear up streetcar tracks all over the city and now, half a century later, this modern light-rail station, which is built on or near the very land they first settled as Gloucester Township pioneers, will bear the family’s name.

The path veers north and follows a fence line along the construction site before it dips down, bringing me to edge of the Rideau River.

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